Genre(s): Romantic Comedy, Slice of Life, School Life (with some action too!)

Length: Two seasons totaling 52 episodes and two different OVAs totaling 4 episodes

Ok, so I'm probably pushing my own personal boundaries with this one, but while School Rumble hasn't been around for a decade quite yet, it's getting darn close! And I've been featuring really old stuff lately, so time to bring it into the new millennium with a show that I'm actually currently watching, as opposed to one that I watched back in the day. School Rumble it is! (I keep typing School Rubmel, which is super frustrating, by the way.)

Summary:

School Rumble follows the stories of Kenji Harima, Tenma Tsukamoto, and a plethora of their friends at Yagami High School. The show is often times downright hilarious, and every episode I catch myself in fits of laughter, while other times it's quite touching. The main story of the show seems to follow Harima, who is on a quest to finally confess his love to the cute Tenma, and Tenma on her quest to confess her love to Oji Karasuma, a rather quiet and strange individual. There's tons of other stuff going on too though, as School Rumble is also very Slice of School Lifey, and the cast of main characters are all pretty great and endearing. Tenma's sister Yakumo, as well as her friends Eri Sawachika, Mikoto Suou, and Akira Takano, are all unique, well written, and get their time in the spotlight as well. For males, in addition to Karasuma and Harima, there's the overly honest Haruki Hanai and the breast connoisseur Kyousuke Imadori, there's a lot more than that but I don't want to make it too long! (or boring)

Thoughts:

School Rumble has quickly become one of my favourite anime of all time. I'm a sucker for good romantic comedies (after all my introduction to all things Japanese started when my friend handed me the first volume of Ranma ½ back in my sophomore year of high school) and School Rumble does not disappoint. Each episode is great and hilarious. It's never boring and Harima, Tenma, and the gang always manage to get into interesting and humorous situations (or forced into interesting and humorous situations). The entire cast of characters, even though there are a lot, are all somehow unique, endearing, and interesting. No matter who or whom each episode happens to focus on, it's always enjoyable and interesting to watch. Sometimes in shows like this there is a tendency to have favourite characters and others who you don't like so you want to skip their stuff, but not so here, everyone is enjoyable as are their stories!

Regarding the tangibles: I really love the art style of School Rumble, though you can tell it aired around the time more and more studios were beginning to use computers to do cool and nifty things, as there are sometimes rather obvious (and uh not good looking) GCI scenes sprinkled around here and there, it's not every episode, but one of the most recent ones I watched had a rather large scene that was done in CGI and I was trying hard not to facepalm! It wasn't bad but yeah, it's like, I dunno my first thought was like someone totally thought it would be super cool to do it entirely with computers so that's what they did. But anyways, small things are small, I love the art and animation, the character designs are great, I don't know, I love everything about this show. The story is good too! Each episode is well written, and the acting is great, yup, everything. I'm not sure why you haven't stopped reading and started watching already.

I'll stop there because I could probably ramble on semi-coherently for a few hours on why this show is one of my favourites of all time. It's really good, and if you haven't given it a look, what are you waiting for!?